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The land of Branded has basically been an empty field populated only by the sound of crickets chirping over the summer, but behind the scenes I’ve been gearing up for the coming Fall and my yearly Countdown to Halloween. I have a fun month worth of posts planned for this season that I’ll be kicking off towards the end of September, but until then (and speaking of crickets) I thought I’d point to some work by a couple of my favorite artists, Sara & Brian Turner the supremely rad Cricket Press. The duo have been producing some amazing illustrations and screen prints for over a decade and I’ve had the opportunity to meet, hang out and work with them during my tenure at Branded. Could ask to meet nicer, more creative folks for sure. Lately Cricket Press has been dipping into the 80s nostalgic well for inspiration in some of their prints that I thought readers here might really dig. Specifically Sara has been illustration and designing a series of prints based on kid adventure flicks like The Goonies, Stand By Me, The Outsiders and E.T.

I love her eye for composition and the perspective she uses with her subjects. There’s a storybook quality to the illustrations that nail the tone of the inspiration while still filtering the pieces through her style that is just awesome. I love way she frames the stand off between the Goonies and the Fratellis in the above print for instance, or the way she condenses the story of the gang from Stand By Me into the one image below. I can feel the vibrations of the train I know is coming, and it illustrates the adventure that’s ahead of Vern, Teddy, Chris and Gordy…

Cricket Press has also recently finished a series of 80s era iconic vehicle prints that are done in a very minimalist style that I absolutely love. I have these hanging in Branded HQ right now…

Not only is the Ecto-1 really beautiful, but his minifigs of our four heroes managed to really nail the personalities of Egon, Ray, Winston, and Peter.

For those unfamiliar, Lego Cuusoo is a community-building based platform to submit ideas to Lego. These projects are put out to the public for support, and if they garner enough attention and votes the project is submitted to a review board for the possibility of becoming a production set. The set that drew my attention to this concept was the Back to the Future DeLorean submitted early last year…

The DeLorean wasn’t the first “branded” Cuusoo project, but it’s the first older property that I’m sure fans have been making builds of for years to finally see an official release. I haven’t picked it up yet, but it sure is tempting. The final build is slightly different than the proposed version above, a little blockier and a bit less sleek, but it’s still pretty fantastic…

Coming hot on the heels of M. Togami’s Back to the Future DeLorean, this new Ghostbusters project got me thinking about what other possible 80s era projects builders have in the works. I mean with two major 80s properties now available you know folks have to be scrambling to showcase their skills on other franchises. It reminded me of a pretty rad series of Goonies sets I saw up on the site recently designed by a builder that goes by the handle Lyonsblood…

These Goonies sets manage to capture the adventure and aesthetic of the film in a very condensed format. Take the organ of bones play set he calls Skeleton Scare. The slide, the pit of spikes and the overall design of the cave are very rad and easily evoke the flick. He’s also designed a set for One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship…

But what really sold me on the Goonies designs were the minifig sets of both the Goonies gang, as well as Mama Fratelli and her boys.

I love how he rendered the rebel flag on the roof, though it’s a design element that is the nail int eh coffin of this project never coming to fruition. I’d have a hard time seeing Lego seek branding approval for such a controversial symbol as that iconic flag. Even so, the build is awesome. While we’re on the subject of rad cars, how about this super cool rendition of the Knight Industries Two Thousand by StevesXD…

He really managed to nail K.I.T.T.’s sleek curves and I think any Knightrider fan would love to have this on their shelf…

How could we have the Ecto-1, BTTF Time Machine, the General Lee and K.I.T.T. without the A-Team and B.A.’s super cool van?!? Thanks to Isreal Lemus, we can take a look at a possible design as well as Hannibal, Murdock, B.A. and Faceman…

Are we likely to see these other projects coming to full Cuusoo fruition? Probably not. I’d have to hazard a guess that the A-Team is too violent a property, the Dukes of Hazzard too controversial, and Knightrider not quite popular enough on the pop culture spectrum to garner enough potential buyers, but I think that the Goonies set has an honest to goodness shot if it can manage to get enough votes to put it in front of the review board.

The only build that’s absent from this list that really surprises me is Airwolf. I must have spent two solid years trying to perfect my own “Lady” out of my rag tag mix of Space and Town sets as a kid. I’m really kind of flabbergasted that no one has submitted a build for one on Cuusoo yet. I couldn;t close out this post without one though, so here’s a beautiful build of the “Lady” by artist Orion Pax…

…but it’s not, it’s hot pink. Now that, that random bit of trivia is out of the way, I wanted to take a second and tackle this week’s League assignment where we’re charged with taking photos highlighting the color blue. Last time we had an assignment like this (with Red), I totally didn’t notice the photo assignment and wrote and essay about blood and how it worked into my first and only fight as a kid. This time I paid better attention and collected some of my favorite blue stuff from around Branded HQ.

First up, one of my two favorite blue t-shirts, and the classiest one I own for sure…

So I was recently indoctrinated into the whole 24-hour T-Shirt a day phenomenon when friend of the site Slick McFavorite (of the Open Your Toys podcast) pointed me to an awesome Universal monster mash-up design that I had to have. Honestly, as much as I’m into pop culture, my wardrobe of cool shirts is pretty damn limited and I’ve been trying to change that over the last six months. One of my favorite recent purchases was from the site Ript Apparel, a shirt called 8DTron by the artist known as Brinkerhoff…

Seriously, how great is this concept?!? Showcasing a bunch of 80s pop culture vehicles, this Devastator-esque combiner robot 8DTron hits on so many of the things I love from my childhood. Airwolf (aka The Lady), the General Lee, Rick Hunter’s Veritech (or the Jetfire Transformers toy, you be the judge), the A-Team van, Ecto-1, Optimus Prime, the license plate from the Back To The Future Delorean, and He-Man’s power sword. Not only is the design super cool, but the actual shirt is pretty damn nice as well, especially for $10 plus shipping.

Honestly, coming across sites like Ript is pretty cool, but it’s also sort of like opening Pandora’s Box (or more accurately, her Armoire) as I can easily see myself developing quite the shirt-a-day habit. Well, Ript is holding an amazing contest where one lucky winner can win the cool shirt mega lottery, literally a shirt a day for an entire year!

Here’s the press release…

“CHICAGO-BASED RIPT APPAREL TO GIVE AWAY ONE YEAR’S WORTH OF GRAPHIC TEES TO ONE LUCKY CONTESTANT

Don’t do laundry for a year: win the next 365 t-shirts from RIPT Apparel

This Thursday until the end of January, RIPT Apparel will be conducting it’s biggest customer giveaway ever. An entire year’s worth of tees will be awarded to one lucky contestant. Yes, that’s 365 shirts, every design printed for an entire year.

RIPT Apparel is a Chicago-based online apparel retailer that sells one new shirt design every 24 hours. Each design is created by artists who share in the profits for each sale and retain the rights to their work after their artwork is sold.”

Just wanted to put up a quick update to remind folks that there is still one more day to enter my pop culture Hot Wheels contest! Contest closes at Midnight tomorrow, 5/31/2012. Oh, and I broke down and totally bought a vintage 1981 Hot Wheels Cannonade. This was one of my favorites back in the day…

So apparently I collect die-cast vehicles. If someone had asked me a week ago if I collected Hot Wheels I could have easily said “no” without any hesitation. There’s no malice in that statement either; it’s not that I dislike these little die-cast metal vehicles. I just never thought of myself as a connoisseur of the medium I guess. I know that I had a handful of cars as a kid, but by and large I was an action figure guy and whenever I found myself in a toy store, I was never drawn to that aisle. I’m not even sure where I came across the handful of cars and trucks I did have, though if I had to bet I’d say they were most likely stocking stuffers.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself picking up a Hot Wheels car here and there, mostly due to some awesome pop culture vehicles popping up unexpectedly on the pegs. I happened to see an Ecto-1 Ghostbusters ambulance one day in Toys ‘R Us and thought to myself, “Neat, wouldn’t it be cool if a few more die-cast cars like this started showing up?!?” Within six months I was alerted to the fact that the Back to the Future DeLorean was released, and then shortly after the A-Team van. At that point I was downright craving more miniature pop culture rides, and even though I found myself gravitating to the Hot Wheels section more and more it always seemed like a pretty fruitless endeavor. There just weren’t enough of these to really keep my interest in continuing the search…

But then here and there I’d find something that caught my eye. Whether it was some of the Tron Legacy vehicles, or a retro Hot Wheels Hot Ones release (like Spoiler Sport) that reminded me of a very similar Incredible Hulk-themed version of the car I had as a kid, I couldn’t help myself and before I knew it I was checking out at the register with two or three cars…

Shortly after Halloween was over last year I stumbled upon a set of Monster Cereal branded cars, which I felt obligated to own as I don’t have any MC merch and this was a fine way of keeping that Halloween-y feeling alive for another week or so. Honestly though, even at this point I didn’t consider myself a collector of little toy cars. But after picking up a slightly expensive new Hot Wheels K.I.T.T. (I didn’t want to wait the eternity it seems for this little guy to hit the pegs), and splurging on a few more of the retro Hot Ones cars last week I think I now have to reconsider my stance on collecting.

I think the final nail in the coffin is that I found myself scouring Hot Wheels wikis and eBay looking for specific cars I had as a kid. After placing a bid on one of them (keeping my fingers crossed) I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve passed a line of demarcation. I apparently collect Hot Wheels.

So, in honor of this realization, I thought it would be fun to do a giveaway of some of the extra Hot Wheels pop culture cars I’ve picked up over the last year. I have two sets to give away, one featuring the 2010 Ecto-1, the 2011 Back to the Future Time Machine, and the 2011 A-Team van, and a second with just has the A-Team van and the BTTF Time Machine. So what do you have to do to win one of these sets? Well, you can send me an e-mail with the subject line “Pop Culture Hot Wheels” and list your favorite Hot Wheels toy or experience. Be sure to include your name and mailing address. I’ll be picking the winners at Midnight on Thursday, May 31st, 2012. Good luck!

**UPDATE** Consider the giveaway pot sweetened! I found two 2012 Knight Rider K.I.T.T. Hot Wheels today, so I’m adding one to each prize pack!

Now, I’m just going to sit back and hope that there will be a Hot Wheels release of some of my other favorite vehicles soon (including the General Lee, Airwolf, and Street Hawk)…